6 Better Ways to Keep Airports Safe

Threats to airliners will not go away anytime soon. Make it harder to hijack a plane, and someone will try to shoot it down. Install X-rays at an airport, and someone will pack plastic explosives in his shoe. Trying to keep ahead of the bad guys, researchers have been working on a number of technologies, from smarter facial recognition software to faster explosive trace detection.

Faster Explosive Trace Detection

Faster Explosive Trace Detection

Detecting explosive traces on luggage is a time-consuming process involving wipe downs with a swatch of cloth and a special device for residue analysis. However, Michigan State University researchers have come up with a faster method using a low-power laser. Basically, it fires two pulses at a target, one in resonance with particular chemical frequencies found in explosives and the other, a "shadow" or control pulse, slightly out of resonance. A reaction in only the non-control pulse indicates the presence of explosives. It's quick, efficient, and could be incorporated within X-ray machines.

Smarter Facial Recognition Software

Smarter Facial Recognition Software

Despite the excitement (and fear) it engenders, today's facial recognition software is a bit of a letdown. That's because the algorithms look at faces as a math problem—for example, measuring the distance between a nose and a mouth or looking at the face as a dense pixel pattern. As a result, the technology is often thwarted by off-angle and low-resolution images. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab Biometrics Center are working on a system that processes images more like a human brain does (for example, factoring in age, gender, and ethnicity, and recognizing a face from multiple angles), and can create 3D models of a face from passport photos.